Joan Robinson Quotes

The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of ready-made answers to economic questions, but to learn how to avoid being deceived by economists.

Voltaire remarked that it is possible to kill a flock of sheep by witchcraft if you give them plenty of arsenic at the same time. The sheep, in this figure, may well stand for the complacent apologists of capitalism; Marx's penetrating insight and bitter hatred of oppression supply the arsenic, while the labour theory of value provides the incantations.

The only thing worse than being exploited by capitalism is not being exploited by capitalism.

Ideology is like breath: you never smell your own.

The first essential for economists ... is to ... combat, not foster, the ideology which pretends that values which can be measured in terms of money are the only ones that ought to count.

One of the main effects (I will not say purposes) of orthodox traditional economics was ... a plan for explaining to the privileged class that their position was morally right and was necessary for the welfare of society.

The point of studying economics is so as not to be fooled by economists.

Whatever you can rightly say about India, the opposite is also true.

Economic theorists should not make such a production about taking a rabbit out of a hat after having put the rabbit into the hat in full view of the audience.

The nature of technology depends very much upon what the public can be induced to put up with.

Unequal distribution of income is an excessively uneconomic method of getting the necessary saving done.

science progresses by trial and error, and when it is forbidden to admit error there can be no progress.

Utility is a metaphysical concept of impregnable circularity; utility is the quality in commodities that makes individuals want to buy them, and the fact that individuals want to buy commodities shows that they have utility.

The very nature of economics is rooted in nationalism. ... It [was] developed ... in the hope of throwing light upon questions of policy. But policy means nothing unless there is an authority to carry it out, and authorities are national.

It is a popular error that bureaucracy is less flexible than private enterprise. It may be so in detail, but when large scale adaptations have to be made, central control is far more flexible. It may take two months to get an answer to a letter from a government department, but it takes twenty years for an industry under private enterprise to readjust itself to a fall in demand.

I do not regard the Keynesian revolution as a great intellectual triumph. On the contrary, it was a tragedy because it came so late. Hitler had already found out how to cure unemployment before Keynes had finished explaining why it occured.

economics limps along with one foot in untested hypotheses and the other in untestable slogans.

Unemployment is a reproach to a democratic government.

Even if the crises that are looming up are overcome and a new run of prosperity lies ahead, deeper problems will still remain. Modern capitalism has no purpose except to keep the show going.

Marxism is the opium of the Marxists.

The fundamental differences between Marxian and traditional orthodox economics are, first, that the orthodox economists accept the capitalist system as part of the eternal order of Nature, while Marx regards it as a passing phase in the transition from the feudal economy of the past to the socialist economy of the future.

Progress is slow partly from mere intellectual inertia. In a subject where there is no agreed procedure for knocking out errors, doctrines have a long life. A professor teaches what he was taught, and his pupils, with a proper respect and reverence for teachers, set up a resistance against his critics for no other reason than that it was he whose pupils they were.

I came away from the talk with the perception that the risk of adverse side effects is so much greater than the risk of cervical cancer, I couldn’t help but question why we need the vaccine at all.

There is no such thing as a normal period of history. Normality is a fiction of economic textbooks.

Where is the pricing system that offers the consumer a fair choice between air to breathe and motor cars to drive about in?

In general, the nightmare quality of Marx's thought gives it, in this bedevilled age, an air of greater reality than the gentle complacency of the orthodox academics. Yet he, at the same time, is more encouraging than they, for he releases hope as well as terror from Pandora's box, while they preach only the gloomy doctrine that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.

A depression is a situation of self-fulfilling pessimism.

At any moment there is certainly not balanced trade between the various areas of the habitable globe that happens to be under seperate national governments - there is an ever-changing pattern of deficits and surpluses.

When I came up to Cambridge (in October 1921) to read economics, I did not have much idea of what it was about.

owning capital is not a productive activity.

Reality is never a golden age.

It is much easier to organize control over one industry serving many markets than over one market served by the products of several industries.

Capitalism with near-full employment was an impressive spectacle. But a growth in wealth is not at all the same thing as reducing poverty. A universal paean was raised in praise of growth. Growth was going to solve all problems. No need to bother about poverty. Growth will lift up the bottom and poverty will disappear without any need to pay attention to it. The economists, who should have known better, fell in with the same cry.

It seems that neither the Keynesian nor the Marxian prognosis of the future of capitalism is being fulfilled and we are left without any particular theory as to what will happen next.

A sure sign of a crisis is the prevalence of cranks. It is characteristic of a crisis in theory that cranks get a hearing from the public which orthodoxy is failing to satisfy.

Marx, however imperfectly he worked out the details, set himself the task of discovering the law of motion of capitalism, and if there is any hope of progress in economics at all, it must be in using academic methods to solve the problems posed by Marx.

Capital' is not what capital is called, it is what its name is called.

It is impossible to add the stock of money to the flow of saving.

Income from property is not the reward of waiting, it is the reward of employing a good stockbroker.

But, as soon as speculators become an important influence in the market, their business is to speculate on each others behaviour.

Rosa Luxemburg maintained that the capitalist system can keep up its rate of investment (and therefore its profits) only so long as it is expanding geographically.

It is the business of economists, not to tell us what to do, but show why what we are doing anyway is in accord with proper principles.

It is the rate of investment which governs the rate of saving, and not vice versa.

New ideas are difficult just because they are new. Repetition has somehow plastered over the gaps and inconsistencies in the old ones, and the new cannot penetrate.

If there is any law governing the distribution of income between classes, it still remains to be discovered.

An economy may be in equilibrium from a short-period point of view and yet contain within itself incompatibilities that are soon going to knock it out of equilibrium.

The orthodox doctrines of economics which were dominant in the last quarter of the nineteenth century had a clear message. They supported laisser faire, free trade, the gold standard, and the universally advantageous effects of the pursuit of profit by competitive private enterprise.

we make a great fuss about national conscience, but it consists mainly in insisting upon everyone ascribing our national policy to highly moral motives, rather than in examining what our motives really are.

The misery of being exploited by capitalists is nothing compared to the misery of not being exploited at all.

It's a terrible thing to be a worker exploited in the capitalist system. The only worse thing is to be a worker unable to find anyone to exploit you.